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Love and Refusal: Contrasting Dialectical Interpretations and its Implications in the Works of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, 1941-1969

Mantell, Cole
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=oberlin156096672701227

Abstract Details

2019, BA, Oberlin College, History.
This thesis is an intellectual history of dialecticism and its use in the works of the Frankfurt School members, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. Famously, these two men had a ferocious and polemical debate in the pages of Dissent Magazine in 1955-56. The Fromm-Marcuse Debate has since become almost the sole lens in which the intellectual differences and similarities between these men are analyzed. Through a comparative and historical analysis of their individual work, largely removed from the Dissent Debate, I offer a new interpretation of their conflict, their personal relationship, and a new perspective on critical theory and its relationship to political action. I argue that Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse's intellectual ideas are better juxtaposed through their interpretation of dialectics, rather than psychoanalysis, and that through this, they present us with starkly different prescriptions for individual and collective political engagement. Thus, both Fromm and Marcuse are outliers within the field of critical theory, and certainly within the Frankfurt School, even as their ideas remain in firm conflict with one another.
Annemarie Sammartino (Advisor)
86 p.
American History; American Studies; European History; History; Modern History; Philosophy; Political Science
Critical Theory; The Frankfurt School; Dialectic; Fromm-Marcuse Debate; Dissent Magazine; The Great Refusal; Adorno; Negative Dialectics; Negative Thinking; Positivism; Positive Philosophy; Hegel; Marx; Marxism; Communism; dialectical; history

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Citations

  • Mantell, C. (2019). Love and Refusal: Contrasting Dialectical Interpretations and its Implications in the Works of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, 1941-1969 [Undergraduate thesis, Oberlin College]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=oberlin156096672701227

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Mantell, Cole. Love and Refusal: Contrasting Dialectical Interpretations and its Implications in the Works of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, 1941-1969. 2019. Oberlin College, Undergraduate thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=oberlin156096672701227.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Mantell, Cole. "Love and Refusal: Contrasting Dialectical Interpretations and its Implications in the Works of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, 1941-1969." Undergraduate thesis, Oberlin College, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=oberlin156096672701227

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

oberlin156096672701227
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© 2019, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by Oberlin College Honors Theses and OhioLINK.